Blues Today

When the results of the field recordings were sent back to the major studios, the record companies discovered that they have a product that they could produce for a special group or people. Since the artists were all black, the sales market would be targeted to the black community which gave birth to the term "race" records. Blues was basically black people's music. It was composed, sung, played and recorded by blacks for their black audiences, but as the blues was gaining in popularity, the audiences began to expand and many white people came to hear the music of the black artists.

The whites took to the blues so rapidly that the major record companies decided to expand their record buying public to include white distributors and jobbers to stock the records in white stores. To accomplish this, they had to change the term "race" records to rhythm and blues. This transformation took place in l949. When rhythm and blues (R&B) was officially adopted in 1949, many disc jockeys, music critics and record companies thought that was the end of the blues. Rhythm and blues was not a racial euphemism that applied to only one group of people. Unlike "race" records that have been in existence since 1920 and included all types of black music, such as jazz, blues, gospels, spirituals, string bands, washboard and jug bands and standard pop music primarily targeted for the black public. R&B embraced both the blacks arid whites.